Giggity Giggity! Family Guy reefers are here!


mtrpls

mtrpls

Ignorance is Patriotic
Well, I have been secretly working on a model railroad project over the last few months, creating 3 fictional reefers for one of my favorite cartoons, Family Guy.

Many of you who have seen the show no doubt know that Peter and his friends enjoy drinking "Pawtucket Patriot Ale", brewed by the Pawtucket Brewery. This beer seems to be present during all of their escapades together.

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^notice the beer can of Pawtucket Patriot Ale in Peter's hand in the above photo^

Since my entire modern NYCS concept is fictional, I had no problems in creating fictional rolling stock for a fictional brewery for a fictional cartoon show. :D

The reefers come out of the Pawtucket Brewery in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and are distributed throughout the country. They are handled by the Providence & Worcester (P&W), which serves the brewery, and are brought up to interchange with the NYCS in Worcester, Mass. The NYCS distributes them throughout the northeast and Midwest, and interchanges them with its many partner railroads. The empty reefers are sometimes accompanied by some loaded corn syrup tankers headed back to the brewery.

This project was both fun and interesting. Also notice, many of the cars have been graffitied with catchphrases from many of the characters. Enjoy the photos!

Here we are lucky to catch the reefers being unloaded at a western warehouse:

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After having been unloaded and pulled out of the warehouse, a Cargill tanker loaded with corn syrup from a nearby processor was coupled to the string. This block will head back to Pawtucket virtually unbroken:

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Closeups:

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What a great idea. They turned out great. I love the weathering you did. The whole back story makes them believable, too.

"Victory is your's!"
 
My God that's Freekin' Sweet!!

Any chance of sharing the artwork for these cars? I'm a huge Family Guy fan too! I'd love some of these babies for myself. Great idea and excellent execution.
 
CP9302 said:
Any chance of sharing the artwork for these cars? I'm a huge Family Guy fan too! I'd love some of these babies for myself. Great idea and excellent execution.
Click to expand...
I was thinking the SAME thing. It'll go well with my Duff Beer cars! :D
 
Well, Josh, how about we trade some Pawtucket Patriot cars for some Duff cars? That way we both will have each kind...

I may be doing another batch of these PAWX reefers sometime in the near future, so let me know. BTW, do you have any pics of your Duff cars?
 
No pictures yet. I have a few cars lined up. I'm using Walther's insulated boxcars. Need to get the decals made up soon, then I can finish them up.

A trade sounds awesome.
 
mtrpls, How much would you be willing to sell custom painted PAWX freight cars? Like say, hoppers for the grains, reefers for the Ale and so on? I am a total nut for Family Guy. One thing your missing on the reefers is spraypainted "BLAST!" LOL
 
That is awsome! I was planning on some Duff and Pawtucket cars on the G scale emipre planned for the yard.
Nice work!
 
What the deuce??

Man that's a great idea. I would love to get in on those decals as well.

Hmm, maybe since Josh is doing Duff and you're doing Pawtucket, I'll do some "Slurm" cars this year. Bite my shiny metal boxcar! :)

Mark
 
Thanks for the compliments, everyone!

As for the decals, I custom designed the Pawtucket Patriot logo (based on artwork from the cartoon) using Adobe Photoshop, and printed a bunch on Microscale Trimfilm with a color laser printer.

The "billboard" decal turned out to be a major headache to apply, since it was difficult to get the decal to settle down into the recesses and rivets of the ribs on the Athearn 57' mechanical reefer. As can be seen in the photo below, the decal spans four ribs:

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Due to the thickness of the Trimfilm, the traditional method of "melting" decals onto cars (Micro-Sol followed by Solvaset) didn't work out quite as well as I had anticipated. After the first application of the setting agents, and allowing it all to dry, I used a sharp Exacto knife to pop out any air bubbles and cut the decal along the ribs (where it quite hadn't settled all the way into the crevice alongside each rib), and applied more Solvaset. Between many rivets and in the crevices of the ribs, however, the green car color was revealed as the decal had chipped off.

I then had to find matching color paint for the yellow, brown, and blue colors of the logo and used a small brush to apply thinned washes of paint onto areas of the decal that had chipped off. I had actually spent two evenings alone just touching up the decal with paint, mainly applying paint alongside the ribs.

All other decals came directly from a set for BNFE reefers (this provided appropriate "mechanical refrigeration" labels and dimensional data for the 57' reefer), and the reporting marks came from a lettering decal sheet.

After this, the cars - originally painted MKT green - went through several airbrush passes of very thinned white paint. Followed this with pastel chalk weathering, rusting with gouache, and the cars were born.

Having tackled many projects in the past, I must admit that these cars were very difficult and time consuming; I would not recommend them for the novice modeler or for beginners.

Based on feedback, I think I will produce more of these cars in the near future and offer them for sale. I definitely want more for my fleet, and it sounds like a few here would like to have some as well. What do you guys think?
 
That is absolutely awesome. Not only the custom decal job but the weathering as well. I'm a huge Family Guy fan and this is just fantastic.
 
Put me down for some cars when you are ready to start selling them too. Very nice!!! :cool:
 
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